One counted device is not one part. A commercial receptacle is a box, a ring, a device, a plate, twenty five feet of pipe, three conductors, connectors, straps and wire nuts. Set that up once here and every takeoff gives you a real material list.
Send this to your supplier
Lighting, gear and panels counted off the drawings, formatted as a quote request. Their cost is left out of your estimate so nothing gets counted twice.
When their prices come back
Paste their reply exactly as they sent it, email body, pasted spreadsheet, whatever. It gets read, lined up against what you asked for, and shown to you before anything is added.
Labor rates and hours
Hours are per device, rough in through trim out. This is the part a flat per device price leaves out: pulling the homerun, terminating it, mounting, trimming, testing.
Hours per device (commercial)
Residential
Houses get priced by the square foot for the base wiring, then the countable pieces on top. A zero means that item is already inside the square foot rate.
Comes from the supplier
Ticked items are quoted by your supplier, so their cost stays out of your estimate and they land on the quote request instead. You still charge your labor on them.
Your standard exclusions
One per line. These go on the bottom of every scope B-Tex writes, so put down what you never include unless it is a line item.
Takeoff
Sheet
Good morning
Here is where the business stands right now.
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⏰ What needs you today
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Money in, last 6 months
Where the invoices stand
Jobs by status
Who owes the most
📋 Latest invoices
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Create an order
Five short steps. Nothing saves until the last one, so you can back out any time.
What are you setting up?
Who is this for?
Not in the list yet? Type a new name below and it gets created with the order.
What is the job?
This drives the Texas lien notice deadlines on the Collections tab.
What is it worth?
Look it over
✎ Editing a saved estimate — "Save estimate" will update it instead of creating a new one.
👤 Customer info
⚡ Add services
🔌 Add materials
📋 Added items
No services or materials added yet.
Texas tax: whether labor gets taxed depends on the kind of job and how the contract is written. Set both below and the app works it out.
Quote summary
Estimated total$0.00
No estimates yet.
⏱ Labor rate and hours
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📤 Import updated prices from a spreadsheet
Upload a CSV or Excel file with a Name column and a Price column (Category, Unit, and Taxable are optional). Rows are matched to your existing services by name — matches get their price updated, anything unmatched is previewed as a new service before you apply it.
⚙ Edit service prices
📤 Import updated prices from a spreadsheet
Upload a CSV or Excel file with a Name column and a Price column (Category, Unit, and Taxable are optional). Rows are matched to your existing materials by name — matches get their price updated, anything unmatched is previewed as a new material before you apply it.
⚙ Materials price list
+ Add a new material
+ Add a new service
Custom services
Checking whether addendum AI is connected...
📄 Upload an addendum, RFP addendum, or scope narrative
Use this when a job picks up extra scope after the original bid — an addendum PDF, a clarification memo, a design-build narrative, and so on. AI reads it and drafts a cost estimate for you to review, edit, and add to a quote. This is separate from the Blueprints tab, which is for takeoff on drawing sheets.
📋 Draft estimate from AI — review before using
Line items
📑 Saved addendum estimates
No addendum estimates yet.
Customers & GCs
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Jobs
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Contracts
This is a view over your existing jobs and customers — nothing here is entered twice. Add or edit contract details from a job's "Contract" section, and add MSA details from a customer's record.
💼 Company-level MSA status
No customers yet.
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Collections
Built from your existing invoices and job/contract data. This is informational, not legal advice — confirm specifics with an attorney before relying on any deadline shown here.
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📝 Log a promise-to-pay or contact
🕑 Activity log
Nothing logged yet.
Blueprint takeoff
Drop in the plan set, pick the electrical sheets, and get a counted takeoff you can price. Big files are fine now.
Checking the takeoff service…
1. Pick the drawings
📁
Drop a PDF plan set here, or tap to browse
Full sets are fine, 200 sheets and hundreds of megabytes.
Nothing uploads until you pick which sheets to read.
2. Choose the sheets to read0 selected
Want a real sheet index? Most drawing sets print the titleblock as artwork, so there is no text to read.
This looks at each sheet and pulls the sheet number, title and discipline, then selects the electrical ones for you.
Costs about a penny a sheet and takes under a minute.
Symbol legend
Pointing at your legend sheet is the single biggest accuracy win. It gets read first, then every other sheet is counted against your actual symbols.
How closely should it look?
How soon do you need it?
3. Reading the drawings
Starting…0%
4. Your takeoff
What goes into the price
Job conditions no adjustment
🌕 Overnight takeoffs in progress
Sent at half price. Most land within the hour, the outside limit is 24 hours. You can close this and come back.
🕐 Past takeoffs0
Saved automatically. Numbers only, the drawings themselves are never uploaded or stored.
Nothing here yetRun a takeoff and it will show up here on its own.
Invoices
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Change Orders & Pay Applications
📋 Select job
📊 Schedule of values (original contract line items)
Optional. Break the original contract into trade/category line items for a full G703. If no line items are added, the app uses the single "Original contract value" and "Work complete %" fields above instead.
No schedule of values line items yet.
+ Add change order
No change orders yet.
G702 Pay Application Summary
Current payment due$0.00
Notes & Tasks
+ Quick note / task
🕑 Open
Nothing open.
✅ Completed
Nothing completed yet.
Reports
Revenue by customer (filtered range)
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Job profitability snapshot
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Texas sales tax, the whole rulebook
Two questions decide the tax on every job you bid. What kind of work is it, and how is the contract written.
Most people only think about the first one. The second one is what the Comptroller looks at.
This page is a plain reading of Texas Comptroller Publication 94-116 and Administrative Code Rule 3.291. It is not tax advice.
Run it past your CPA before you change how you bill.
Answer three questions
A hotel, or anything rented for less than 30 days, counts as commercial.
Your estimates today are written lump sum.
The five treatments
Lump sum or separated, side by side
Lump sum
One agreed price. The materials are not stated apart from the labor.
You are the consumer. You pay sales tax to Crawford or Lonestar when you buy.
You do not put a tax line on the customer's paper. The rule says you "shall not collect from a customer
any amount represented to be tax on a lump-sum charge."
Your material price has to already include the tax you paid, or you eat it.
Separated
The estimate states a price for materials and a price for labor.
You are a retailer. You hand your supplier a resale certificate and buy the incorporated materials tax free.
You do collect tax from the customer on the materials line.
You still owe tax on your own tools, equipment and most consumables. Those are never resale.
The exception that has been costing you money. Commercial repair and remodel is a taxable service, not a sale of
materials. The entire charge is taxable to the customer whether you write it lump sum or separated. Choosing lump sum
does not remove the tax there, it just means it does not show on the paper and comes out of your pocket in an audit.
Things that trip people up
Your own estimates, worked out
These are the eight you sent me, run through the rules above. This is where the app's number and yours disagree.
Estimates 1736 and 1737 are the same restaurant three weeks apart, taxed two different ways. That inconsistency is the
thing an auditor notices first.
The pattern runs both directions. On residential you tax the labor lines, which Texas does not tax, so you have
been charging homeowners about $792 more than you should across these three. On commercial you sometimes leave
the labor out, which Texas does tax, so you are carrying about $396 you never collected. It is backwards on
both sides.
What your supplier invoices tell me
Crawford Electric and City Electric Supply both bill you at 0.00% tax. Every invoice you sent shows
SALES TAX $0.00. That means you are already buying on a resale certificate at both houses.
That is a real decision, not a paperwork detail. Buying on resale makes you a retailer of those materials.
The tax did not disappear, it moved onto you to collect from the customer and remit. So a separated contract is the
lane you are already in, and this app now defaults to it.
Where that leaves a lump sum job. If you write a lump sum contract and still pull the material tax free on
your resale certificate, nobody has paid the tax. Not you at the counter, not the customer on the invoice. You took
that material out of resale as the end user, so you owe use tax on it yourself. Ask your CPA whether that has
been getting accrued. If the answer is no, that is the gap worth closing first.
Texas Administrative Code Title 34, Section 3.291, Contractors
Rate used in the app is 8.25%, which is the 6.25% state rate plus the 2% local maximum that applies in Round Rock and
most of Williamson and Travis County. If you work a job outside a local taxing district the rate is lower, so check the
Comptroller's address lookup before you bid it.
Demand letter
Add customer
Master Service Agreement (MSA)
Add job
Contract details
The "Customer" above is your GC / the party who hired you. If there's a separate property owner, enter it here — Texas lien law treats owner and GC as different parties, and it matters for notice deadlines.